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Another pet peeve. Nounifying the word "ask"

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Sorry about not blogging, my days are filled with meetings trying to finish up our LH beta2 features - I can't wait until people see this stuff, it's that cool.

But because I'm in meetings back-to-back (my calender looks like a PM's these days), I get subjected to a bunch of stuff that I just hate.

In particular, one "meme" that seems to have taken off here at Microsoft is nounifying the word "ask".

I can't tell how many times I've been in a meeting and had someone say: "So what are your teams asks for this feature?" or "Our only ask is that we have the source process ID added to this message".

For the life of me, I can't see where this came from, but it seems like everyone's using it.

What's wrong with the word "request"?  It's a perfectly good noun and it means the exact same thing that a nounified "ask" means.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    August 04, 2005
    Ouch.

    I've never been exposed to that, but I can certainly see why that'd be annoying.

    It seems somewhat unstoppable, the overgrown "nounification" :) of words.

    I'm not sure how I'd respond to that type of impaired usage of the language, but I suspect that a simple, "Pardon Me?" along with "I don't understand the use of the word 'ask' in that context--Could you clarify what specifically you are saying?" ... A couple of those type responses, and "new word geeks" could get the message.

    eeesshh.

  • Anonymous
    August 04, 2005
    Larry,

    On a related note, do you know why a lot of MS employees like to start their sentences with "So"?

    I have observed this in the Channel 9 videos, TechEd and PDC.

    Thanks.

  • Anonymous
    August 04, 2005
    Actually what I hate even more are people that pronounce 'ask' as 'axe'. Whenever I hear "I axed you a question..." in a movie or TV show, I want to scream out loud "It's ASKED! Not AXED!" Of course I wouldn't say it that politely either...

  • Anonymous
    August 04, 2005
    "What's wrong with the word "request"? It's a perfectly good noun and it means the exact same thing that a nounified "ask" means."

    Ah, but 'ask' is one less syllable to cope with :-)

  • Anonymous
    August 04, 2005
    Of course making verbifying nouns has also excessificated. As Calvin one said, "Verbing wierds language."

  • Anonymous
    August 04, 2005
    An ask is informal and can easily be dismissed or denied. A request is formal and must be denied formally. At least that is how I would look at it from how you describe.

  • Anonymous
    August 04, 2005
    I understand the reaction to neologisms... sometimes it feels like an in-group/out-group marker....

    Maybe the term we're seeking is "nominalization"?
    http://encarta.msn.com/dictionary_1861683578/nominalize.html

    jd/mm

  • Anonymous
    August 04, 2005
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 04, 2005
    Hadn't Wall Street nounified 'ask' long before anybody at Microsoft got around to it?

  • Anonymous
    August 04, 2005
    ha! I ranted about this one a while ago too. Glad to see I'm not the only one that it irks. http://www.thedatafarm.com/blog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=07e346a4-9a1b-401a-b4cc-da2416399d36

    :-)

  • Anonymous
    August 04, 2005
    I see what Brian is saying, I don't agree; if the difference was ask vs. require, I would. "Require" has a very different meaning, but 'request' and 'ask' appear to be interchangable, and neither should be used as a noun.

  • Anonymous
    August 04, 2005
    That does sound annoying. Toss it in the bin with "offline", "double-click", and the rest of them.

  • Anonymous
    August 04, 2005
    Actually, the "So"-thing may be a Northwest-thing. I grew up within driving distance of Seattle, and I've noticed we have some peculiarities, language-wise.

    I didn't start noticing until my HS English teacher begged me long ago not to append an "s" to "anyway".

    Well, there was also the strange absense of "r" in "Washington", and the way people from .. elsewhere .. pronounced "Oregon" as if they were trying to say "Oregano".

    I'm still trying to figure out how "espresso" keeps getting written and pronounced as "expresso": there's nothing fast about it.

  • Anonymous
    August 04, 2005
    express, v., squeeze out (juice, air; from, out of).

    Unless I'm mistaken, that's essentially the same word as the root of the Italian "espresso", and so it's a perfectly sensible anglicization to follow the root over and get "expresso". It doesn't have anything to do with "fast".

  • Anonymous
    August 04, 2005
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 04, 2005
    In my experience, "ask" means more than "request". It's more like "requirement" or "demand". Which belies the politeness behind the verb "to ask".

    And I hate the word, too.

  • Anonymous
    August 04, 2005
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 04, 2005
    "and finally got turned into a noun" should of course be "and finally got turned into a different noun"...

    (Why in this day and age people write comment systems without a preview button is beyond me. :)

  • Anonymous
    August 04, 2005
    I felt the same annoyances when people started verbifying the word "action". As in "I'll action that for you right now". What's wrong with "do"!? Gah!

  • Anonymous
    August 04, 2005
    Well, if you're going to rant against people's "asks" you can't very well go around using the word "nounify," can you...

  • Anonymous
    August 04, 2005
    "Ask" as a noun would definitely bug me. The (horribly wrong) idiom that is going to give me an aneurysm some day is "[Something] needs fixed." Gah!

  • Anonymous
    August 04, 2005
    D. Philippe, do you have a better word for
    "the action of turning a verb into a noun"?

    Yes, I made it up on the spot (it's sort-of the opposite of verify), but...

  • Anonymous
    August 04, 2005
    I have always wondered what happened to the word "well". Maybe I just lost touch, but it seemed that one day I woke up and "well" dropped off the face of the earth.

  • Anonymous
    August 04, 2005
    > Nounifying

    You mean nouning. Any noun can be verbed. After verbing it can be renouned. Any verb can be nouned. After nouning it can be reverbed.

    Adverbs are less powerful. Most can only be deadverbed, though folklore has it that some were proverbed.

  • Anonymous
    August 04, 2005
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 04, 2005
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 04, 2005
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 04, 2005
    I think the number of asks one can request is proportional to the amount of spend available.

  • Anonymous
    August 04, 2005
    I'll take a reverbed noun over a renouned verb any day. Go boogie!

  • Anonymous
    August 04, 2005
    If y'all have to ask, y'all can't afford it.

  • Anonymous
    August 04, 2005
    Beware of creeping gerundization.

  • Anonymous
    August 04, 2005
    I hate "ask (n.)" too. I like the use of "story" though. I can't think of a better way to say: "The .NET framework doesn't have a good story for audio/video" (taken from some blog).

  • Anonymous
    August 04, 2005
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 04, 2005
    Regarding pronouncing (or even writing!) espresso as 'expresso', I always say, in Dutch: "Zeg je dat expres zo" which means 'Do you say it like that on purpose?' ;-)

  • Anonymous
    August 05, 2005
    More management-speak.

  • Anonymous
    August 05, 2005
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 05, 2005
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 05, 2005
    "Story" is indeed horrible used in this way. A good way of saying the .NET framework doesn't have a good story when it comes to audio/video, is to say the .NET framework doesn't support audio/video. Which is how it is.

  • Anonymous
    August 05, 2005
    Re Jeffrey Whitney

    Churn, a thing for making butter, comes from Old English.

    Churn, a churning action or sensation, was coined in the late 19th Century.

    Churn as a noun isn't new.

  • Anonymous
    August 05, 2005
    What about verbifying noun? :-)

  • Anonymous
    August 05, 2005
    "Nounify" is probably more exact in this case than "gerundize" or "to gerund". A gerund in English typically (always?) refers to the present participle (-ing ending) used as a noun. e.g. Running is fun. Running is a gerund.

    Nounify would tend to be broader, including all the ways a verb could be used as a noun. Ironically, being broader makes it more exact in this instance. (Or more correct, anyway.)

  • Anonymous
    August 05, 2005
    My gripe is at the word "normalcy". I noticed it emerging in the immediate aftermath of the 9-11 attacks.

    "New Yorkers are hoping for a return to normalcy."

    People, the word should be "normality"! I blame 24 hour news stations who seem to be trying to cram as much into their time slots as possible, therefore dropping syllables wherever possible.

  • Anonymous
    August 05, 2005
    I'm sorry - did you really say "nounifying"? Surely you have to be joking? :)

    In case you're really serious (surely not!), I can highly recommend that you look in a dictionary:

    http://tinyurl.com/d8doo

    This is also a good one:

    http://tinyurl.com/c2tep

  • Anonymous
    August 05, 2005
    "Return to normalcy" was Warren G. Harding's presidental campaign slogan from the early part of last century; the OED quotes a 1929 statement that "If 'normalcy' is ever to become an accepted word it will presumably be because the late President Harding did not know any better" -- and it seems that that has indeed come to pass.

    Meanwhile, the OED traces "ask (n.)" to the 1200s, though it doesn't seem to have been particularly common. The current draft version has entries for the modern usage, which seems to have mostly been of the form "a big ask" or "huge ask"; the earliest form they found of it relates to a sports column in a 1987 Sydney newspaper, and the other quotes also seem to largely be sporting-related.

    Larry can perhaps take perverse comfort in the fact that there's a second meaning of "ask" as a noun: it's an old Scottish (and north-English) word for a newt.

  • Anonymous
    August 05, 2005
    My bad! I'll so stop saying that.

  • Anonymous
    August 05, 2005
    My response to situations like this is to say, "See, you're going to have to use English when you talk to me, because I don't speak <insert derogatory term>."

  • Anonymous
    August 06, 2005
    Useful memes don't have a readily available alternative, so new words/usages such as "offline" and "double-click" are acceptable to me.

    Similarly, "Doh!", expresses something more deeply than just "oops" to anyone who watches The Simpsons.

    In contrast, I shudder when I hear "incentivize" when "to motivate" or "to encourage" works so much better.

    Using "ask" as a noun when the word "request" is available just shows a poor command of the English language, and I humbly "ask" Microsoft to cease and desist.

  • Anonymous
    August 06, 2005
    Jonathan is, technically, correct -- according to the OED of his second tinyurl link (which, I'll note, is a fairly old dictionary and is not yet complete for usages after 1920 or so!), the word is nounize.

    This is not a significant distinction. The OED is a recorder of usage, not an arbiter of "correctness" (whatever that means), and almost certainly nounify will be entered in it whenever they get around to that part of the update. In the interim, the fact that nounize is in there serves to illustrate that (a) people have been verbizing the word "noun" for over a century, and (b) fashions have changed slightly (but meaninglessly) on the particular way of doing so.

  • Anonymous
    August 07, 2005
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 07, 2005
    I don't like it either, but...

    It's been suggested that English is becoming 'place positional', in that words are changing from being either nouns or verbs, but rather noun or verb status is inferred from usage and placement in the sentence.

    It's rather like the difference between Roman and Arabic number systems.

  • Anonymous
    August 08, 2005
    You could always respond by using an even more ridiculous 'noun.' For example:

    "Our key asks...well, that depends on what your key whats are and who the key who's are. If your whos do the whats then there's nothing left to ask."

    Or you maybe:

    "The key ascii's run from 0 to 255 (or was it 251). They're a standard mapping for the roman alphabet with some extensions for accented characters and some funky symbols, nul's and beeps you can use to make askee art."

  • Anonymous
    August 10, 2005
    I understand that it's sometimes annoying but as someone else pointed out it's part of the natural process of the language that is a constantly evolving thing and there's nothing we can do about it.
    I personally don't like this evolution of "ask" only because it doesn't sound very pleasantly to my ears but that's the only reason.
    What I really hate are not syntaxic fads but more dangerous things , cultural imitation leads to people using stupid, pseudo-intellectual concepts such as the oh-so-1995 concept of "meme".
    Oh and the whole concept of "blogs" should be burnt to the ground too.
    These are the dangerous thing.

  • Anonymous
    August 10, 2005
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 19, 2005
    I thought I was alone in hating this misuse of the word 'ask'. Perhaps it's only a MS thing? - It was an email I got today which led me here.

    ..."Can you send me on a copy of the mail you received so that I can help **** with the reporting ask?"

    Horrible!! I HATE IT!!!

    Almost as much as I hate;

    - 'on the radar' (off the radar, fell off the radar etc..etc..)
    - 'talk to it' (instead of talk through it)
    - 'blurb' (add some blurb to that)
    - 'deck' (in reference to a powerpoint)
    - 'ping him/her'
    - 'working from home' - liar. :)

    One of the other posts reminded me;

    - 'space' (as in "he's moving into the <dept> space") So everyone is floating around in some sort of void in there?

    Probably.

  • Anonymous
    October 14, 2005
    You also see this with wins.
    "What are our key wins ?"

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